Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own.
Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own lives and selves. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned by fathers, punished by step-mothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children's stories not in wh they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one.
In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness -- from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sewn among the meek is harvested in crisis...
In Hans Christian Andersen's retelling of the old Nordic tale that begins with a stepmother, "The Wild Swans," the banished sister can only disenchant her eleven brothers -- who are swans all day look but turn human at night -- by gathering stinging nettles barehanded from churchyard graves, making them into flax, spinning them and knitting eleven long-sleeved shirts while remaining silent the whole time. If she speaks, they'll remain birds forever. In her silence, she cannot protest the crimes she accused of and nearly burned as a witch.
Hauled off to a pyre as she knits the last of the shirts, she is rescued by the swans, who fly in at the last moment. As they swoop down, she throws the nettle shirts over them so that they turn into men again, all but the youngest brother, whose shirt is missing a sleeve so that he's left with one arm and one wing, eternally a swan-man. Why shirts made of graveyard nettles by bleeding fingers and silence should disenchant men turned into birds by their step-mother is a question the story doesn't need to answer. It just needs to give us compelling images of exile, loneliness, affection, and metamorphosis -- and of a heroine who nearly dies of being unable to tell her own story.
Stichwörter: stories fairy-tales transformation hans-christian-andersen folk-tales swans the-wild-swans
Cease striving. Then there will be transformation.
ZhuangziStichwörter: buddhism transformation striving
I love my enemies for two reasons: they inspire me to recognise my weakness. They also inspire me to perfect my imperfect nature.
Sri ChinmoyStichwörter: enemies perfection transformation
Changing yourself changes everything.
Bryant McGillStichwörter: perspective change psychology growth healing transformation self-realization personal-development outlook
My art is largely made up of my pain; re-framed, redesigned and re-purposed. It's a mutually beneficial experience for both the creator and the beholder. Transformative healing is a beautiful process.
Jaeda DeWaltStichwörter: inspirational pain creativity self-expression transformation healing-through-art
The continued appeal of anarchism can probably be attributed to its enduring affinity with both the rational and emotional impulses lying deep within us. It is an attitude, a way of life as well as a social philosophy. It presents a telling analysis of existing institutions and practices, and at the same time offers the prospect of a radically transformed society.
Peter H. MarshallStichwörter: society transformation anarchism philosphy way-of-life
Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.
Günter GrassStichwörter: transformation translation
I want to say before I go on that I have never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I haven't done it now to sound as though I might be proud of how bad, how evil, I was.
But people are always speculating-why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.
Today, when everything that I do has an urgency, I would not spend one hour in the preparation of a book which had the ambition to perhaps titillate some readers. But I am spending many hours
because the full story is the best way that I know to have it seen, and understood, that I had sunk to the very bottom of the American white man's society when-soon now, in prison-I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life.
Stichwörter: prison islam transformation american-society
Every 'no' is a 'yes' to something.
Eric Micha'el LeventhalStichwörter: inspirational consciousness purpose inspiration suffering intention self-awareness unity awareness transformation good-and-evil know-thyself self-transformation duality dark-and-light
To experience what isn't, love what is.
Eric Micha'el LeventhalStichwörter: consciousness experience love acceptance change miracles suffering intention self-awareness awareness transformation resistance karma blessing self-transformation
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